The present invention relates to conditioning hair and skin, particularly the hair and skin of the human body. More particularly, the present invention relates to methods of imparting conditioning to the hair and skin and to compositions useful as hair conditioners and skin conditioners.
Hair conditioning imparts to the hair many attributes which are perceivable and are considered to be desirable. That is, hair conditioners are used so that the hair feels, to the touch, smoother and softer. In addition, hair conditioners are used to render the hair more easily rinsable when it is washed or rinsed, to improve the wet and dry combability of the hair, and to impart to the hair greater ease of detangling and greater manageability to combing, brushing and styling.
Skin conditioners are used generally to improve the feel of the skin to the touch, rendering the skin softer and smoother feeling. In addition, skin conditioners are used to impart to the skin a feeling of fullness and smoothness as well as freedom from dryness and freedom from roughness.
Numerous compositions have been available commercially for conditioning the hair and the skin. More recently, however, governmental regulations and the preferences of the individual consumer have given rise to concerns that consumer products including hair conditioners and skin conditioners not pose excessive risks of damage to the environment. While these concerns have generally been addressed by improvements in composition so that materials when discarded or washed away are relatively less damaging to the environment, it would be useful to be able to formulate hair conditioning products and skin conditioning products which are in fact biodegradable. In this way, the desirable conditioning properties would be provided, and the product upon disposal or removal by washing and the like would be capable of biodegrading, that is, being converted by the processes normally encountered in waste water treatment and the like into components which pose an even lesser risk of harm to the environment and which can be dealt with ever more easily by the customary processes for treating solid waste and waste water.
Unfortunately, actual experience prior to the present invention has generally found that agents that might be considered in hair conditioning compositions and skin conditioning compositions, which agents are found to be biodegradable, perform only poorly if at all as conditioning agents for the hair and skin. In fact, this experience has been encountered so uniformly that there has seemed to be essentially a negative correlation between biodegradability and effectiveness as a conditioner for the hair and skin; that is, an agent found to be biodegradable would accordingly not be expected to, and would not, perform adequately as a conditioning agent for the hair and skin.
Thus, there remains a need for conditioning agents and for compositions containing such agents exhibiting biodegradability and also exhibiting exemplary performance as conditioners for the hair and skin. The present invention satisfies this need, even in the face of expectations to the contrary as drawn from experience with many biodegradable compounds.